Read Starfish for Free Online

Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer."
    Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You're lying , she realizes. You're scared to death, and it's not just because I'm changing.
    It's because you are.
    * * *
    Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: something has changed on the ocean floor.
    We sleep and the earth moves she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it'll move right out from under us.
    I wonder if I'll have time to feel anything.
    She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.
    "The seabed shifted," Clarke says. "There's a new outcropping about two hundred meters west of us."
    "That's odd. I didn't feel anything."
    "It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep."
    Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought...
    "I — would've woken up," Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.
    "Two meters high, twelve long," Clarke recites.
    Ballard doesn't answer. She punches some commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, reforms into a column of numbers.
    "Just as I thought," she says. "No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours."
    "Sonar doesn't lie," Clarke says calmly.
    "Neither does seismo," Ballard answers.
    There's a brief silence. There's a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.
    "We have to check it out," Clarke says.
    But Ballard only nods. "Give me a moment to change."
    * * *
    They call it a squid; a jet-propelled cylinder about a meter long, with a headlight at the front end and a towbar at the back. Clarke, floating between Beebe and the seabed, checks it over with one hand. Her other hand grips a sonar pistol. She points the pistol into blackness; ultrasonic clicks sweep the night, give her a bearing.
    "That way," she says, pointing.
    Ballard squeezes down on her own squid's towbar. The machine pulls her away. After a moment Clarke follows. Bringing up the rear, a third squid carries an assortment of sensors in a nylon bag.
    Ballard's traveling at nearly full throttle. The lamps on her helmet and squid stab the water like twin lighthouse beacons. Clarke, her own lights doused, catches up about halfway to their destination. They cruise along a couple of meters over the muddy substrate.
    "Your lights," Ballard says.
    "We don't need them. Sonar works in the dark."
    "Are you breaking regs for the sheer thrill of it, now?"
    "The fish down here, they key on things that glow—"
    "Turn your lights on. That's an order."
    Clarke doesn't answer. She watches the beams beside her, Ballard's squid shining steady and unwavering, Ballard's headlamp slicing the water in erratic arcs as she moves her head—
    "I told you," Ballard says, "turn your— Christ! "
    It was just a glimpse, caught for a moment in the sweep of Ballard's headlight. She jerks her head around and it slides back out of sight. Then it looms up in the squid's beam, huge and terrible.
    The abyss is grinning at them, teeth bared.
    A mouth stretches across the width of the beam, extends into darkness on either side. It is crammed with conical teeth the size of human hands, and they do not look the least bit fragile.
    Ballard makes a strangled sound and dives into the mud. The benthic ooze boils up around her in a seething cloud; she disappears in a torrent of planktonic corpses.
    Lenie Clarke stops and waits, unmoving. She stares transfixed at that threatening smile. Her whole body feels electrified, she's never been so explicitly aware of herself. Every nerve fires and freezes at the same time. She is terrified.
    But she's also, somehow, completely in control of herself. She reflects on this paradox as Ballard's abandoned squid slows and stops itself, scant meters